


Your Beautiful Lies

by scribblemyname



Series: Be Compromised 2014 Promptathon [13]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Community: be_compromised, Community: comment_fic, Defection, Established Relationship, F/M, Identity, Making Another Call, Morality, Partnership, Post-Battle of New York (Marvel), Spies & Assassins, Truth & Lies, pre-avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-12 06:10:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2098566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha looks at Clint sometimes with blank-faced dismay for all the reasons he gives for having trusted her. They are lies, but they are beautiful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Beautiful Lies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [likewinning](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likewinning/gifts), [SneakyHufflepuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SneakyHufflepuff/gifts).



> Prompt by hufflepuffsneak: [Natasha thinks she's a better person around Clint. Clint thinks she's been that person all along. They're both wrong. ](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/412023.html?thread=7823223#t7823223)
> 
> Also prompt by likewinning: [MCU, Natasha, Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been [Angel]](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/548452.html?thread=77540964#t77540964)

"Can you wipe out that much red?" Loki had asked.

Natasha, Natalia, Black Widow looked at Loki with the appropriate expression for the part she was playing, but inside, she was unmoved. She had always known that the answer was no.

* * *

Clint does not believe in impossibilities. He positions his arrow and stretches the bow taut, lining up sight and target. He never misses, never fails.

She is the Black Widow and even her record is not so perfect.

Clint does not believe in impossibilities. When she is with him, Natasha does not either.

* * *

She loves to watch his hands as she does sit-ups and push-ups and crunches; Clint is sitting across the living room, waxing his bowstring, fletching his arrows, cleaning his guns. There is something soothing about watching the play of tendon and muscle in his hands as he works. He is solid in the way that she is a blank sheet of paper to be laid flat and formed into whatever origami shape she determines is necessary. He is unmoveable and strong.

Natasha unfurls abruptly onto her feet and comes over to sit beside him Indian style and lean her head against his knee to watch, fascinated by a weapon he has made part of himself that is not himself. She is a weapon and she has weapons, but she has nothing like his bow.

Clint says nothing. He does not need to, and the silence between them settles comfortably.

It is almost strange, an eerie edge inside of her, that she can relax like this and let herself be human. She is a better person around Clint. She is a person at all.

* * *

She asks him the week after her arrival at SHIELD why he spared her life.

Clint looks at her with narrowed eyes and tilted head in puzzlement. "You said it yourself. You're a weapon."

Natasha stares at him blank-faced and wonders what he means.

* * *

Natasha is a weapon. She slides open a mission brief and pulls on the person it requires her to become. Clint watches her back, loves her life more than his own, protects her, and cares for her as his partner. He waits until she takes the person off and becomes the weapon again to love her for herself.

Natasha used to be a knife without a sheath. Now she knows that Clint can hold her and not be cut.

* * *

"I feel like a person with you," she tells him four years into their partnership, ten months into his bed. It's idle talk, pillow talk, soft words breathed on each other's skin.

He looks up at her with dark eyes and that puzzled frown. "You were always a person, Natasha."

* * *

He thinks he saw a person when he aimed an arrow at her heart. He thinks she knew the difference between right and wrong when he made another call.

Natasha looks at Clint sometimes with blank-faced dismay for all the reasons he gives for having trusted her. They are lies, but they are beautiful.

She strives to live up to his lies. She knows what he sees when he looks at her, and she knows inside herself that he created her from his belief. She hangs this person she is becoming from his reasons and lets him anchor her.

A weapon has no morality.

* * *

"Tasha, I love you," he rasps as blood pours out of his body.

It is cliché, she tells him, to admit such things while dying. It is unacceptable. She will not do cliches with him, so he must live.

* * *

Natasha, he names her, unthinking, unconsidering of the gift he gives her, then Tasha, then Nat, then Tash. He watches her back and lends her his strength. She finds a taste of morality by imitating his.

 _I feel like a person with you, Clint_ , she tells him before she tells him by choosing right over wrong until she even starts to care.

* * *

"Do you know what it's like to be unmade?" Clint asks her, eyes dark with hurts raw and bleeding still.

She turns to him without expression and answers, watching him carefully as he bandages his wounds with her presence, her understanding, then the ability to anchor her still.

Natasha does not ask him, because she too knows the answer to her own question, if he knows what is like to be made.

* * *

Clint has always been the anchor in their partnership as she has always been the driving force. They are thrown off balance after New York because he is the blank sheet of paper too rough from being lived in to lay flat and fold into a new shape.

She tries to find the lines within her own self to show him, but there are no lines. She is smooth and formless until she pulls on another necessary person. She always hung herself on him.

* * *

Natasha is training like there are ghosts haunting her, like guilt dogs her steps in the wake of the battle. Everyone looks for Clint's dark form shooting arrows into his past and future, as if that will help him cope, but it is Natasha who beats against the punching bags and targets like she can destroy the pain and fear within her if she just fights hard enough, long enough.

She always thought she was a better person around Clint because he made her the person she can call her own, but perhaps she isn't, perhaps she was wrong, perhaps it is only his strength and not hers that made her choose right over wrong and balance out ledgers and fold herself like a shelter around him in what others might call love.

Natasha leaves the gym and goes to Clint's room to pound on the door until he yanks it open, startled and worried, and drags her into his arms. Even now, he finds it easier to protect another than to heal himself.

"You spared my life because I was a weapon," she tells him.

He gives her that puzzled frown, then it falls away beneath something hard and hurting. "It's not the same, Nat."

But it is the same. It is. She said it herself.

"A weapon has no morality."

* * *

_Are you or have you ever been only a weapon, Clint?_ she wants to ask him three months into their partnership, two weeks after their first kiss, five days into what could only be called their relationship. She does not ask because the answer is the same as hers to his: _Are you or have you ever been your own person, Natasha?_

No.

* * *

The answer changes after Loki.

For both of them.


End file.
